Class Versioning in Runtime Data Sharing with Distributed Cache

Today many organizations use .NET and Java technologies to develop different high traffic applications. At the same time, these applications not only have a need to share data with each other, but also want to support runtime sharing of different version of the same class for backward compatibility and cost reduction.

The most common way mostly used to support runtime sharing of different class versions between .NET and Java application is through XML serialization. But, as you know XML serialization is an extremely slow and resource hungry process. It involves XML validation, parsing, transformations, which really hampers your application performance and uses extra resources in term of memory and CPU.

The other approach widely used to support sharing of different class versions between .NET and Java is through database. However, the problem with this approach is that it’s slow and also doesn’t scale very well with the growing transactional load. Therefore, your database quickly becomes a scalability bottleneck because you can linearly scale your application tier by adding more application servers, but you cannot do the same at the database tier.

This is where a distributed cache like NCache comes in really handy. NCache provides you a binary-level object transformation between different versions not only of the same technology but also between .NET and Java. You can map different versions through an XML configuration file, and NCache understands how to transform from one version to another.

NCache class version sharing framework implements interoperable binary serialization custom protocol that generates byte stream based on specified mapping in such a format that any new and old versions of the same class can easily de-serialize it, regardless of its development language, which can be .NET or Java.

Here is an example of NCache config.ncconf with class version mapping:

How does NCache do Class Versioning in Runtime Data Sharing?

In the ncache.config file that you see above, you’ll notice that the Employee class has a set of attributes defined first. These are version independent attributes and appear in all versions of .NET and Java classes. This is actually a superset of all attributes that appear in different versions. Below that, you specify version-specific attributes and map them to version-independent attributes above.

Now, let’s say that you saved .NET Employee version 1.0.0.0. Now, when another application tries to fetch the same Employee, but it wants to see it as Java version 1.0 or 2.0. NCache knows which attributes of .NET version 1.0.0.0 to fill with data and which ones to leave blank and vice versa.

Finally, the best part is that you don’t have to write any serialization and deserialization code or make any code changes to your application in order to use this NCache feature. NCache has implemented a runtime code generation mechanism, which generates the in-memory serialization and deserialization code of your interoperable classes at runtime, and uses the compiled form so it is super-fast.

In summary, using NCache you can now share different class versions between your .NET and Java applications without even modifying your application code.

President and Technology Evangelist Iqbal Khan co-founded Alachisoft to provide world class performance and scalability solutions. Thanks to our customers, Alachisoft achieved its goal with NCache, the .NET caching market leader for 13 years running. Then, under his leadership, the company introduced TayzGrid, an elastic in-memory data grid, and the first fully featured .NET NoSQL Database in the market, called NosDB.

Iqbal's Master's of Computer Science from Indiana University, 25+ years of experience in software architecture, design and development, and hands-on business experience make him a great resource internally and in the Developer Community. He is a frequent speaker at industry events including DevWeek London, TechDays France, VSLive! Shows etc. plus you can find him at local .NET Code Camps and Meetups. He has written for MSDN magazine, CodeProject and Visual Studio Magazine.